Privatisation for all those services is crap and should be prevented and undone where it has occurred.
"Privatization" and "undo" implies that these were once public utilities. They werent.
They were in Australia - hence privatisation with an "s".
Someone screwed up, or misinterpreted the contract. Maybe thats the NSW Police or maybe it was an overeager MF salesperson a decade ago. Vendor says you owe us big time, org says nu-uh we'll just remove the software. Most corps and vendors settle before the lawyers get involved but occasionally things go further.
The massive beat up about the cops being untouchable and the vendor not being able to get the police to investigate themselves is complete bollocks. Seriously since when do the cops get involved in corporate contract disputes?
National media coverage of MicroFocus suing their customers is probably not a good way for them to drum up business.
But there is a significant difference between a don't-show-message cookie and a we-know-everything-about-you cookie.
Is there?. If the cookie is persistent (survives browser close) then it just contains a big random number that might uniquely identify you. This big random number is a key to the server side database that stores everything-we-know-about-you, including the bit about you having seen the message. You have no way of knowing if that is all they are tracking.
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton